Abbott ready to put G20 behind him

Australia's climate change denying PM left out in the cold

My prognosis that the heat would be on Tony Abbott at the G20 was largely borne out. It was a tough meeting for him, and whatever remains of personal warmth or trust between the Australian prime minister and U.S. President Barack Obama will have been diminished by its outcomes.

Abbott's best public moment was his closing media conference. He gave an impassioned defence of the meeting's achievement in agreeing on a concrete, statistically verifiable plan to raise global growth by 2.1 percent over the next few years. This strategy was essentially negotiated by Treasurer Joe Hockey and senior national officials, who also drafted a communiqué, in the months preceding the meeting. There was, apparently, nothing very controversial in this "Brisbane Plan" and it was welcomed by G20 leaders and international financial agency heads.

This G20 was not a boring talkfest, however. On two important matters — climate change and Ebola — the dynamic of the meeting got out of the chairman's control and produced outcomes clearly not to his liking. Abbott's counter-strategy — quite successful in retrospect — was to set media hounds running to the side-drama of Vladimir Putin. As Anglosphere leaders and journalists goaded and stalked the impassive Putin over Ukraine, Abbott — having stoked this fire assiduously over past months — stood back smiling, saying it was the chairman's task as host to treat all participants with equal respect during the meeting, and that he had had his say on Ukraine at APEC a few days earlier. All this distracted the media from the real story: how Abbott had lost control of the meeting.

The real and historic drama at this G20 revolved around climate change policy, and the protagonists here were Abbott versus most leading participants. The denialist Abbott failed to keep climate change policy discussion out of the G20 meeting.

He had had no warning of the major Obama-Xi carbon emissions reduction target agreement a few days earlier. Then he was wrongfooted by Obama's brilliant and moving appeal to Australian youth at Queensland University on Saturday to resist the outdated thinking of their elders and the vested coal interests. Cameron supported that message the next day. The heatwave helped. Abbott and Canada's Harper were on their own.

Obama announced a generous U.S. pledge of $300 billion to a U.N. Green Climate Fund to help developing countries to avoid going down the carbon road. On the next day, Japan's Abe pledged $150 billion. Both leaders thus responded promptly to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon's appeal for early generous pledges.

There were bitter behind-the-scenes battles between Australian officials and other delegations on how strong the communique language on climate change should be. Australia lost. The original draft was greatly strengthened. The final communiqué appealed to G20 members to make strong early commitments to new decarbonization targets well ahead of next year's Paris Climate summit, and to make early pledges to the Green Climate Fund. At the media conference, a clearly disgruntled Abbott said Australia will address such matters at the appropriate time.

The other drama was Ebola. Again as with climate change, there was a drafting committee confrontation which Australia lost as to how strongly the communique should appeal to countries to give generously to the world battle against Ebola.

There is no doubt that the US was a major protagonist in these policy confrontations with Australia. As Obama happily told his post-meeting press conference, this G20 had made real progress towards "its three main policy goals": in trade reform, in climate change and Ebola. So where did the Australian mantra "this G20 is all about jobs and growth" go?

Abbott's forgettable moments included his introductory remarks about his achievements in ending the carbon tax, stopping the boats, and building roads; and regretting his difficulties in getting the Parliament to pass a $7 patient's contribution to doctors' visits. The stony, stunned faces of other leaders as they listened to this odd discourse said it all. Bill Shorten's later critique of it as "weird and inappropriate" was justified.

I was also struck by the inappropriate scheduling of a tripartite US/Japan/ Australia leaders' side meeting to discuss defense cooperation in Asia. If the theme was to be cooperation in containing China — as had been tipped to media that it would be — the timing and venue were highly inappropriate, so soon after the Obama/Xi climate policy breakthrough and even an announced improvement in China/Japan security relations, and the day before Xi was to address the Australian Parliament.

I assume Australia had suggested this meeting. In the end, to give it some public justification, they played the Putin card again, producing a joint statement on Ukraine.

Abbott in Sunday's G20 energy discussion reportedly made a defiant defence of the continuing need for coal for years ahead, and he repeated this in his final press conference.

I would say this was an interesting G20 with undercurrents and side-currents of real drama. It succeeded by its own dynamic and under the convention that every such meeting must be successful because it would reflect badly on all august participants if it were not. But clearly Abbott did not get his own policy way at this meeting, and it showed (e.g., in Hockey' strained reaction to persistent questions on climate change on the ABC's Insiders on Sunday). Now, Abbott will put the best face on it.

Brisbane was thanked for its hospitality, and Abbott was thanked for being a good and effective chairman. Maybe the contrived anti-Putin sideshow will save him from the worst negative public assessment of his own achievement at this G20. But I am sure he was glad when it came to an end.

Tony Kevin is a former Australian ambassador to Cambodia and Poland, and the author of "Crunch Time," a book exploring Australia's inadequate policy responses to the climate change crisis.

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